Confused and overwhelmed

[Heather Mcclelland]

Every time I start getting confident about my technical abilities, I find something that puts me squarely in my place.

I am an all over apple user. And that means I have info all over all my apple devices, mostly in various apps and of course all over the cloud.

I started googling personal knowledge management to see what I could do about putting everything in one spot, in the hopes of sharing at some point. I came across tiddlywinks. In theory, it sounds awesome. But, I have no clue where to start. And worse, I'm having a hard time understanding how to access whatever it is that I'm creating. 

I'm a graphic design student and am feeling a little dumb at my lack of knowledge in the developing area.

Where is a good place to go with just some very basic info?

[TonyM]

There is a wealth of information within https://tiddlywiki.com/

and a lot more around. Search for anything in google including TiddlyWiki and you will see. Just keep an open mind and play. Ask questions here, in the group people will answer do not be afraid or embarrassed.

Some things are very east to learn and others quite difficult but we help each other and many minds are thinking how to help people like yourself.

See this forum online and use search within it for great results, just choose to move on if the thread is too technical for the time being.

TiddlyWiki is brilliant see this to see they way enthusiasts describe tiddlywiki and you will be hooked, but you are starting starting a journey.

TiddlyWiki has being the key to my personal knowledge management for many years now, trust me :)

Tony

[Diego Mesa]

Hello!

I'd also like to stress that https://tiddlywiki.com/ while containing a lot of information, is also a fully working tiddlywiki itself! I use this all the time to try stuff out and experiment! 

Diego

[Mat]

Welcome Heather,

You indicated that you want a tool for "personal knowledge management". TW is a very good choice but it does have a steep learning curve. However it is also "discoverable" in that you can use it out of the box and add more advanced stuff as your demands increase.

What did you try thus far? What instructions did you follow thus far?

<:-)

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Heather,

Your pain is our collective failure to resolve an issue we've had for a long time. We are clearly not doing a good enough job of explaining Tiddlywiki to new users. 

It's nobody's fault, really. The very nature of tiddlywiki is to be non-linear and the website for Tiddlywiki *is* a Tiddlywiki, so it has *everything* crammed into it - the most advanced, esoteric topics right alongside the most basic information. For those of us who already (kind of) know what's going on, it's too easy to lose sight of just how confusing it is for newbies.

But, we really have to fix it if we want more people to use Tiddlywiki (and anyone who uses it should want that, because it's the best way to ensure it sticks around).

This problem is made ~1000 times worse with the current situation of having 17 (!) different available saving mechanisms listed on the main page and expecting people to somehow know what's going on.

I'm really sorry you had such confusion but if you're willing to stick with it a little, we can help you figure it out and hopefully we will learn something from your experience that we can use to improve the documentation.

I'm assuming that you have an actual mac and not just iOS devices? If so, start like this.

1. Go to https://www.tiddlywiki.com

2. Scroll down to click the green button that says 'download empty'

3. Open the file that you downloaded - this is "a tiddlywiki" and it's running wholly on your own computer

4. Click the + icon in the sidebar to make a new tiddler

5. Notice that the 'tick in a circle' icon turns red - this means you have unsaved changes

6. Click the 'tick in a circle' icon to download another copy of your wiki

7. You can continue to add content to the copy you have open and "download" a new copy whenever you want to

8. You can host your wiki anywhere the same way you would host any html file, but you need to keep track of all the downloads to make sure you have the latest one

This is called the 'download saver' mechanism and the other 16 (!) methods all exist because it is quite clunky.

Tiddlywiki gives you complete control of your own information but of course the flip-side of that is it gives you complete responsibility. That's why it's so important to make sure you figure out the whole saving malarkey before you invest time in making anything substantial and hence why we have to make such a song-and-dance about it.

For every person who posts here, I bet there are literally hundreds who give up and walk away feeling stupid (you're not) so thank you very much for taking the time. I hope you'll give it another try and let us know if there's anything else that we can help you with. 

Regards,

Richard

[TonyM]

Richard,

Please be aware your statement "I bet there are literally hundreds who give up and walk away feeling stupid" is speculation, and I do not think it fair to say it to new users.It could be a "self fulfilling prophecy". Sure show compassion and offer support, continue to promote improvement but saying "Huston We Have a Problem" at the front door, when it is only an opinion. Hmmmm

Otherwise I love your contributions Richard.

Regards

Tony

[RichardWilliamSmith]

Hi Tony,

Yes, I intended it to sound like speculation. That's why I worded it the way I did. I'm afraid I don't see how it's 'unfair' to anyone if I speculate in public about such a thing and, in general, I don't appreciate attempts to police my speech. FWIW, everything I write here or anywhere else is 'only an opinion'. Some of my opinions are strongly held, some are weakly held but all of them are sincerely held and I express them only with the intention of helping other people. They are also amenable to change via conversation.

If you think I'm wrong, I'm happy to discuss it with you. I don't expect Jeremy will do anything he doesn't want to. I certainly don't expect him to change the site because I think it should change. But I also don't expect he'll be bothered if we discuss it.

I think there is too much clutter and confusion on the homepage at present and the text that greets first-time users doesn't do a good enough job of explaining what Tiddlywiki is and why it might be useful. The most amazing thing about the site, which *we* all know, is that it's a Tiddlywiki itself but it doesn't tell new users that anywhere, does it? It could say something like "congratulations, you just downloaded everything you need to use Tiddlywiki, a non-linear notebook that runs privately in your browser.". It should (in my opinion) emphasise that there is no backend involved. Then it should provide dirt-simple instructions for downloading empty, making one edit and saving the result locally. If that's compelling to people, and if they have an inkling of the other things it can do, they will (in my opinion) be more likely to invest the effort necessary to figure out which of the saving mechanisms they prefer.

For what it's worth, if it were completely up to me I would have the current site become the 'docs' website and replace it with a much simpler site aimed at marketing Tiddlywiki more effectively. It could still be built with Tiddlywiki and could still contain some instructional material, but I would use a more linear structure.

Regards,
Richard

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao RichardWS

RichardWilliamSmith wrote:

... I think there is too much clutter and confusion on the homepage at present and the text that greets first-time users doesn't do a good enough job of explaining what Tiddlywiki is and why it might be useful.

Right.

RichardWilliamSmith also wrote:
the current situation of having 17 (!) different available saving mechanisms listed on the main page and expecting people to somehow know what's going on.

I agree. IMO, TiddlyWiki is Blessed/Cursed by its flexibility. On the one hand, once you get some footing with it, its an ever expanding horizon of ways ahead. On the other hand, it can be an off-putting mess for being able to find a simple way to just start.

I think this partly reflects love of the great DIY routes to TW. BUT I think we sell many potential users short by giving more options than many a starter can cope with.

Its not anyone's fault. This situation was not planned. But the complexity of entry is, I think, too much.

I often wonder if whether TW uptake would improve if we had ONE saving method (or the practically closest to that). Surely the real point is writing Tiddlers, not having to obsess over saving methods?

I am simply, I think, of the view that most potential users probably neither need multiple routes nor have interest in them.

And my guess is pitching TW as a more "click & go" mechanism with the LEAST NO OF STEPS to get started would improve uptake.

In some previous posts @Jermolene has referred to one possible future for TW for "starting users" might be an online service that deals with all the complexity on saving for the basic user. In an increasingly "cloud" world that might have merit too.

Just thoughts.

Best wishes
Josiah

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao TonyM

TonyM wrote:

... "I bet there are literally hundreds who give up and walk away feeling stupid" is speculation

... and I do not think it fair to say it to new users. It could be a "self fulfilling prophecy".

Yes and a big NO.

The issue, to make it coldly rational, is between IDEOGRAPHIC explanation (a person's experientially informed intuitive grasp of the situation) and NOMOTHETIC reasoning (objective data collection to instantiate material trends).

Lacking clear statistics on who takes up what when and how here making ideographic guesses about usage is VERY important. RWS did that.

RichardWS' comments I think were spot on. Mat has made similar points in the past. And I and others have too.

The "User who never signed up" remains largely unknowable. But that does NOT have any implying that we can't know there is a problem that they didn't sign-up. We have that signal from our own knowing.

Best wishes
Josiah

[Abraham Samma]

Information/knowledge in one place is what tiddlywiki is all about. Its basically a html5 app that is portable and that can also be hosted online like a normal website. As many have already pointed out, you can start by checking out tiddlywiki.com

You'll find tiddlywiki to be a great way of experimenting with web technologies. Many in here have contributed code, plugins and projects to this thing. I encourage you to not falter and stay on to discover more. You won't regret it.

Welcome.

[TonyM]

Folks,

You all miss interpret my comments, and in fact I expected that. I am all for warts and all critical conversation but on a thread with a newbie who had no need to get involved with this issue, just give them solutions. We have perhaps even too many.

Once again I have made a quick and short responce rather than addressing comments in detail. I hope you can extrapolate.

please do not be offended, its a simple point.

tony